'Watchmen' just capped off a perfect season. Where do we go from here?

HBO's first — and perhaps only! — season of Watchmen is now officially over and wow, what an ending. Jon Osterman, the being known as Doctor Manhattan, is dead? Maybe? Or is that Angela Abar's job now? It's more certain in the case of Lady Trieu, crushed beneath the weight of her own technological marvel (let's just call it hubris), like the true daughter of Ozymandias that she is. Er, was.

Meanwhile, the actual Ozy, Adrian Veidt himself, is on his way to face justice thanks to Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman. Maybe she'll finally stop calling him "Mirror Guy." Once they unleash the evidence they've collected, President Robert Redford will presumably face impeachment proceedings.

Also, a bunch of evil racists died in a literal flash, and with full awareness of the fate that awaited them. It was so, so great.

The Watchmen Season 1 finale is all about closure, and it more than delivered. And while it certainly seems like the one season is all we'll get, there's still a lot of untouched story to work with. This show re-wrote our understanding of the comics and effectively charted a whole new path forward. Even if this is it for that story, it's fun to think about what might get explored in a theoretical Season 2.

As the Doc himself has said, nothing ever ends.

A metaphysical love story

Image: Mark Hill / hbo

The finale might lead us to believe Doctor Manhattan is dead dead, but I don't think it's quite that simple. Trieu didn't simply kill him; she converted his physical form into a bundle of energy that she was going to then transfer to herself, along with the Doc's powers. That plan fell apart thanks to Adrian's icy squidfall, but what happened to all that gathered energy?

Albert Einstein said that "energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another." In Episode 8, Jon told Angela that he could give his powers to someone else by putting them into a piece of food that could then be consumed — such as the unbroken egg Angela finds and eats at the end of the finale.

Let's be clear, though: that egg probably isn't all of Jon. He went right on and kept existing after the egg scene in Angela and Cal's kitchen, only to then be torn apart soon after by Trieu's device. So setting aside the egg, what happened to the energy that Trieu intended to absorb into herself?

It's unclear. Presumably, the Doctor Manhattan energy got set free when the machine was destroyed. And hey, remember his origin story. The human form of Jon Osterman died in 1959 when he got stuck in a test chamber and his physical form was subsequently blasted into nothing. But then, in the months that followed, Jon's body re-formed, layer by layer, as the energy we came to know as Doctor Manhattan took on a physical form.

Who's to say the same thing won't happen again? Having even one character running around with Doctor Manhattan-level powers raises some narrative challenges, and now we could have two of them. It's the Superman conundrum: When you've got beings this powerful, how do you create a story that has stakes?

Given the events of Watchmen's nine episodes, it's safe to say that fans trust the writer's room to get it right. And there's no doubt that we'd would like to see, or even just imagine, a happy ending for Angela and Jon.

Trieu's confusing legacy

Image: mark hill / hbo

OK, so. Trieu is dead. But Trieu's cloned mother is Bian, and she's still alive. She watched her daughter/mom die and, in our last look at her, she's in the back of a Tulsa PD police car wearing a vacant expression and saying nothing.

That final moment could mean anything, so let's consider the bigger picture first. Bian knows she's a clone. She also either knows or will eventually learn the circumstances of how Trieu came to be born. How would she find out with her daughter/mom dead? Don't forget which company makes those Nostalgia pills out of elephant juice.

There's also always the cloning option. If it worked for Bian, it should work for Trieu as well, right?

So a theoretical Season 2 could find Clone Bian raising Clone Trieu, or perhaps human Trieu reborn from her mom's clone. Adrian had plenty of samples left in the vault when Bian, the original Bian, left Karnak for good.

What that means for the story is anyone's guess. Like I said, our last look at Bian doesn't leave us with much. She seemed chill about knowing she's a clone for the brief time that she's known it, but that doesn't mean she'll continue to be OK with it forever.

But hey, let's assume Bian continues to be fine with that fact that she's a clone. She's probably going to feel pretty bent about the roles Angela, Laurie, Wade, and of course Doctor Manhattan himself played in her daughter/mom's death. And as the assumed inheritor of Trieu Industries, she'll certainly have the resources, not to mention the motive, to put together a revenge plot.

What's next for America?

Image: mark hill / hbo

When we leave Watchmen, the United States of America is presumably about to get a major wake-up call. Laurie and Wade have undeniable evidence of the plan Adrian put into motion back in the '80s. The events of 11/2 and all the subsequent squidfalls were a hoax, perpetrated by a narcissistic megalomaniac who believed he was the only person capable of bringing about and maintaining world peace.

What will happen to the USA once the truth comes out? Or after Redford, whose administration was a force for positive social change, is shown to be an illegitimate president? Watchmen has dealt very directly with issues of systemic racism and the generational traumas brought about by the same, so it's reasonable to expect that a theoretical continuation of this story would grapple with all of the above.

Will Redford's undoing spell regression for American society's efforts to root out the latent racism? Is such a thing even possible in a world that has shoved such ideologies into the shadows more forcefully than our own has ever managed to? (History has unfortunately shown that yes, it's entirely possible.)

All of this depends on a lot of assumptions of course. Laurie and Wade plan to arrest Adrian and share his story with the world. But as we know from the end of the comics, that story almost came out once before until Doctor Manhattan vaporized Rorschach. It didn't stop Rorschach's journal from coming out in the end, but it kept the real truth behind 11/2 from public eyes.

Doctor Manhattan isn't around anymore to vaporize potential squealers (not that he necessarily would this time around). But there are plenty of other forces in the world — including Redford himself — that could pour resources into keeping Adrian's secret, and themselves, safe.

Two more loose ends

The above tweet was obviously a joke, but questions remain about Lube Man. I'll get to him in a minute. There's another loose end I want to mention first.

Dan Dreiberg! The costumed vigilante once known as Nite Owl. Keene Jr. referenced him way back in the third episode when he sent Laurie off to Tulsa. Back in the old days of the comic, Dan and Laurie had a romantic relationship. We know she still feels something for her former lover, based on her pet owl and her exchange with Keene in that same scene.

The season finale indirectly references Dan yet again when Adrian shows Laurie and Wade their only ticket out of Karnak: Archie, Nite Owl's flying "Owlship." Adrian's kept it in Karnak for all these years. And even though its presence matters to the plot as a Karnak escape route, things didn't have to be that way. We know Adrian has working teleportation technology. That makes the implicit reference to Dan in the finale's final minutes feel a bit more purposeful. He'd almost surely pop up if this story were to continue.

Then there's Lube Man. The mysterious, bodysuit-wearing voyeur popped up briefly in Episode 3, seemingly tracking or spying on Laurie. The show never revealed who he was and never revisited his character after that brief and intensely weird scene.

I'd love to see a second season give us more insight into Lube Man's whole story. But thankfully, we're not completely robbed of closure here. It just requires a little reading.

HBO's "Peteypedia" — a reference to Laurie's vigilante-obsessed traveling partner, Agent Dale Petey — has been a tremendous font of supplemental information over the course of the entire season. In one of the last entries, added after Episode 9, an FBI memo confirms that Petey's employment was terminated after he went missing in Tulsa. It also notes that he's "at risk for vigilante behavior," given his interests.

But that's not all. Among the items found in Petey's former office is "a jug of what appears to be some kind of canola oil." While it's not direct confirmation that Petey was actually Lube Man, all the pieces fit together.

Don't bother getting your hopes up for more Watchmen at this point. All signs suggest there are no plans for it to happen, and indeed a general desire to see it not happen. But life goes on even in the absence of a second season, and it's a fun exercise to think about where all of these incredible characters might end up next.